Let’s Talk About It: Picturing America
The Work of Freedom: Individual and Communal
Recommended Reading
The following works are recommended for those who would like to continue
reading and discussing books on this theme.
Fiction
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain. This semi-autobiographical novel
takes place in Harlem in the 1930s. Fourteen-year-old John Grimes is being
raised by his mother and stepfather, Gabriel, a preacher who is abusive to his
family. Defying expectations that he too will become a preacher, and imagining a
broader life for himself, John rejects the strict religious discipline preached by his
stepfather. The story, told from the perspective of John, Gabriel, Gabriel’s sister,
and John’s mother, is a tumultuous exploration of attitudes on sex, race,
generational differences, and individual efforts to separate from the oppressive
notions of others, be they parents, whites, the church, or the opposite sex.
Marita Golden, Long Distance Life. Marita Golden uses the story of one family
to chronicle transitions in the lives of African Americans as they moved from the
rural South in the Great Migration, struggled through the Jim Crow and civil rights
eras, and settled in urban ghettos. Esther, the daughter of a successful mother
and revered father who died when she was a child, drops out of Howard
University and takes up with a married man, has a child, and finds herself losing
all sense of herself. She heads south for five years during the height of the civil
rights movement, later returns to resume her life, giving birth to another child and
watching the divergent paths her two children take. Told from the perspective of
various characters, this novel explores issues of class and race and the struggle
to realize individual ambitions.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon. “Milkman” Dead, breast-fed and otherwise
coddled too long by his mother, is unhinged by family conflict and obsessed with
gaining wealth. His estranged sister’s granddaughter, Hagar, desperately in love
with Milkman, plots his murder in response to his rejection of her. His friend
Guitar likewise wants him dead, suspecting that Milkman has cheated him out of
hidden gold, wealth that Guitar planned to use to finance a group set on
avenging the murder of blacks by whites. In his search for the gold, Milkman
meets Circe, a mystical woman who recalls his family history, particularly a greatgrandfather who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa. Toni Morrison’s
fantastical novel explores the complexities of the quest for identity.
Jean Toomer, Cane. At the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, Jean
Toomer—a man of mixed racial heritage—struggled to understand issues of race
and identity. His 1923 novel defies standard structure, offering poems and lyrical
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prose, stories and vignettes to provide a unified impression of African American
life and to explore broader themes of miscegenation, sexuality, and racial
identity. The novel is organized into three sections, centering on life in rural
Georgia, the black ghetto of Washington, D.C., and returning to rural Georgia.
Among Toomer’s characters are Karintha, a disturbingly beautiful black woman,
and Becky, a white woman who gives birth to two black sons in a small Southern
town.
Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children. This was Richard Wright’s first
published book (1938), and its very title suggests a break from past
submissiveness and signals the beginning of modern black “protest” literature.
Drawing on his own experience growing up in the Jim Crow South, as well as
research he conducted as a journalist, Wright offers five stories, originally
published independently. An adolescent is forced to flee the rural South to avoid
his likely lynching after being in the wrong place at the wrong time; a
conservative pastor finds it within himself to resist the blandishments of the white
powers-that-be to lead a protest rally in a small Southern town; a woman absorbs
a new vision of resistance given her by her sons as they work with the
Communist Party.
Poetry
Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks’s first book of
poetry focuses on a racially segregated neighborhood in an unnamed city,
patterned on Chicago’s South Side. Brooks celebrates the vitality of Bronzeville,
the passion and promise of black folks who have fled the South for prospects up
North; but she also offers a realistic portrait of their poverty and despair. Brooks
captures the rhythm of city life among maids and hustlers, preachers and office
workers, all crowded into a ghetto and making do with what little opportunity they
have to live fully realized lives.
Lucille Clifton, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980. Known for
examining themes of gender and race consciousness, Lucille Clifton offers
several of her published poems, including “Generations,” “Good News about the
Earth,” and “An Ordinary Woman.” Her womanist perspective and ethnic pride
mix with a spiritual consciousness rendered in lyrical mysticism. The book also
includes her personal history, one of overcoming obstacles and discovering and
expressing her creativity even as she came to know herself as daughter, wife,
mother, and friend.
Kwame Dawes, Wisteria. Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes carries
the spirit of the diaspora in this collection of poems based on his friendships and
conversations with elderly black women in the small town of Sumter, South
Carolina. The women, all in their 70s and 80s, recall Jim Crow laws and sweet
dreams of better lives for their children, along with recollections of everyday life
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fortified by faith and hope. Dawes beautifully renders the voices of common
people and conveys their impact on his sense of place and identity.
Robert Hayden, Collected Poems. The first black poet chosen as consultant to
the Library of Congress, Robert Hayden drew on extensive research he
conducted while working for the Federal Writers’ Project for the historical basis of
much of his work. The collection includes a series of poems on slavery and the
Civil War and musings on historical figures from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm
X. Hayden combined the historical and personal to offer a perspective on the
longing for freedom from bondage and stereotype and all other encroachments
on human expression.
Langston Hughes, The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. These poems
are sharp-eyed, colorful portrayals of the daily life of African Americans rendered
in the phrasings of colloquial language, songs of faith, soulful blues, and vibrant
jazz. His poems are of trials and triumph, freedom and uplift, and the everyday
rhythms of life’s joys and sorrows. The collection includes his best-known poems:
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” and “Refugee in America.”
Quraysh Ali Lansana, They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems. Speaking
mostly in the voice of Harriet Tubman, Quraysh Ali Lansana renders a songlike
dialect that reflects on the steely determination of a woman who understands the
compelling need for freedom. He also presents Tubman as a woman, less than
heroic—the sum total of all the parts of every woman, complete with self-doubts
and longings, but somehow assembled into heroic proportions.
Marilyn Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till. Emmett Till was fourteen years old
when he was murdered in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white
woman. His death sparked protests that fed the nascent civil rights movement.
Marilyn Nelson explores Till’s life and the forces of racial hatred that led to his
death. She touches on justice, innocence, and ghosts of “strange fruit.” Her poem
is written as a “heroic crown of sonnets” —interlinking lines of poetry, with the
last line comprised of the first line of each of the preceding 14 sonnets. This
precise structure enables Nelson to protect herself emotionally as she struggles
with this very painful subject.
Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems. Published
in 1999, this book brings together poems from earlier collections by Sonia
Sanchez, including I’ve Been a Woman (1978), Homegirls and Handgrenades
(1984), and Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995). Sanchez, one of the most
powerful voices of the Black Arts Movement, brings boldness, strength, and
energy to political awareness, as well as an inner emotional sense, as she
explores racial identity, sexuality, and spirituality.
Theater
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W.E.B. DuBois/Thulani Davis, The Souls of Black Folks. In 2003, on the
occasion of the 100th anniversary of the publication of W.E.B. DuBois’s The
Souls of Black Folks, Thulani Davis staged dramatic readings from that famous
work. DuBois offered the thematic frame for examining race in America through
the “double consciousness” used by African Americans and the “veil” behind
which emotions were hidden. His collection of essays, many in response to
Booker T. Washington’s more moderate stance on the pace of racial progress,
forcefully declared that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of
the color-line.” In 1995, Davis participated in the documentary film W.E.B.
DuBois: A Biography in Four Voices, along with Wesley Brown, Toni Bambara,
and Amiri Baraka, describing significant periods in DuBois’ life.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland, From the Mississippi Delta. Playwright Endesha
Ida Mae Holland offers an autobiographical stage piece portraying the resilience
of the female spirit. Three narrators tell the story of Phelia, a black girl raped at
age eleven by her white employer who turns to prostitution and stealing until she
finds redemption as a civil rights worker, and ultimately earns a doctoral degree.
Phelia’s mother, Aint Baby, has her own triumphs, progressing from brothel
madam to certified midwife.
Samm-Art Williams, Home. Crossroads, North Carolina, in the late 1950s has
little to offer the restless Cephus Miles. When his sweetheart, Pattie Mae, leaves
for college and eventually marries someone else, he is humiliated and rendered
directionless. He refuses to fight in Vietnam and serves time as a draft dodger.
Later life in the big city offers a string of nowhere jobs. He loses the family farm
until a mysterious benefactor rescues it. By the late 1970s, Cephus returns to
witness huge changes in the town, the end of segregation, and new
opportunities. But he continues to feel like an outsider, struggling with notions
about the meaning of home.
August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The second work in August
Wilson’s chronicle of the African American experience, this play is set in 1911 in
a boardinghouse in Pittsburgh. Owner Seth Holly, his wife, Bertha, and their
boarders talk about migration from the South, hopes of jobs in the North,
disappointments of life, and the constraints of racism. A few of the boarders are
haunted by memories of bondage and their fear of Joe Turner, a representational
character who kidnapped freed and runaway slaves. The residents wrestle with
searches for lost loved ones, and for a place for themselves in a changing world.
Nonfiction
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In this 1926
essay, written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes
speaks to black intellectuals and artists, urging fearlessness in combining their
art and their racial identity. He cites the frustrations of racial strictures but rails
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against the temptation of artists to standardize themselves to white norms.
Hughes urges artists to free themselves from constraints set by whites and
distorted middle-class notions about the value and beauty of black culture.
Amiri Baraka, Home: Social Essays. Amiri Baraka reprints essays he wrote in
1965 when he was still known as LeRoi Jones, offering a look back at the
tumultuous 1960s. The collection begins with “Cuba Libre,” recalling a trip to
Cuba on the first anniversary of Castro’s coup and Baraka’s exuberance at
witnessing the successful outcome of a revolution and the promise of true reform.
The collection moves on to angry and defiant essays about social injustices in
the United States and sharp criticism of a consumer culture that ignores social
inequities in favor of creature comforts.
Let’s Talk About It: Picturing America is a project of the American Library
Association Public Programs Office, developed with funding from the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Museum and Library
Services.
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